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Description: Every business can benefit from having a clear overview of conversions on their website. It enables us to see whether the marketing efforts are working. And one of the best ways to track the conversions is via Google Tag Manager (GTM). Let’s take a closer look.

Whether you provide sites like Stellar Wind or run an eShop selling bicycle parts, it’s vital to pay close attention to the number of conversions you get every day. Having a clear overview of customer actions on your site lets you see if your marketing is worth its costs and enables you to devise winning growth strategies. But how to track the conversions? Many business owners are reluctant to look into it because they think measuring anything on their site requires coding skills. However, there’s also a way to do it without prior programming knowledge: via the Google Tag Manager (GTM). You only need to create a GTM account, install the conversion tag, and you’re all set. Here’s a closer look at how this nifty Google-provided tool works.

When we talk about conversions, we don’t only mean buying products or services from you. A “conversion” can be any of your prospects’ actions that help you towards marketing or business goals. For example, every time someone subscribes to your newsletter or downloads your app, it’s a conversion.

So, where does the GTM tag manager come to play? Using the various tag templates enables you to see where the converting visitors are coming from. Maybe they clicked on your ads on social media or found you when searching a specific keyword on Google. Whichever’s the case, knowing the source of your clients enables you to direct your ads only to the channels that bring in results.

Before you can start using the Google Tag Manager, you need to create a new account. Signing up is a simple process, and we’ve probably all done it many times on various websites on the internet. After completing the registration, you can start building a software container for your website. It’s a feature that provides you with all the necessary tools to work in different environments like private data centers, the cloud, hybrid, etc.

The next step in the Google tag’s setup is integrating the code snippets that record the conversions. The cool thing is that you do not need to modify your source code to fit the snippets. Even skilled programmers would need to spend a lot of time doing this. With the GTM’s tag setup, you can place pieces of third-party code into your system with only a few clicks. Let’s see how it works with the conversion tracking tags.

A conversion tag is a tag type that records every visitor who goes through your sales funnel. It follows their journey from clicking on your promotions to reading your content to taking action. And, as mentioned before, the last part does not always mean buying from you. Getting a prospect to subscribe to your newsletter is also a conversion that has value to your company. So here’s how to activate the conversion tags:

• On GTM’s homepage, you’ll find the button “New Tag.” Click on it. A Template Gallery opens.
• Find the Conversion Tag from the list and click on it. A text box opens.
• If you want to track purchases on your website, use this box to define the conversion value in dollars or other currency.

The Google Tag Manager’s primary function is to monitor every interaction visitors have on your web pages. And every time someone takes a desired action on your site, GTM compares the occurrence against a catalogue of events, also known as triggers. That means the triggers are there to signal whenever an individual tag should get activated.

But every website aims to track different types of conversions. So you have to generate your custom triggers based on your specific needs. Luckily, there’s nothing complex about the process. You can choose from a list of predefined triggers. Some of these include:

• A timer goes off after a visitor has spent a specific amount of minutes or seconds with your content.
• Page View activates with every new page load.
• Click trigger. It fires every time someone clicks a button on your website.
• The Form Submission trigger registers every new subscription.

The complete selection of triggers is available by typing the name of any desired item in the configuration box. This search bar opens when you click on a plus sign at the right top corner of your GTM’s interface. Once you’ve found the trigger you need, click Save, and it will get added to your tagging scheme. The next step is publishing your tags.

Publishing the Tags on Your Pages

So let’s guide you through the process of publishing the tags. You should see the Submit button at the right top corner of your GTM’s interface. Click on it to open a menu. Look up Publish and Create Version, and select it (it’s often already selected by default). But before clicking on the Submit button to publish the tags, you can use the “Preview” button to test all the tags and triggers in action.

Now, let’s take a closer look at the way you can configure GTM to measure conversions in the two most popular online ads types: Google Ads and Facebook ads.

Google Ads Conversion Tracking

If your business is not advertising itself via Google Ads yet, you’re missing out. It’s an excellent channel for quality lead generation because people finding your ad via Google are already searching for products or content similar to yours.’ But it’s good to get a confirmation of the effectiveness of these ads. Knowing exactly how many conversions they produce informs you whether you need to adjust your campaigns. So here’s how to track the Google Ads conversions via GTM:

• Create a new tag template. And name it “Google Conversion Link.”
• You want the conversion tag to get triggered on each page of your website. Click on the “All Pages” trigger to activate this feature.
• Go to your Google Ads account and click on “Tools and Settings.” Find the “Conversions” button, and click on it.
• Pick the conversion type you want to measure.
• Categorize and name the conversion.
• Navigate to the tag set up by clicking “Create and continue.”
• From the selection, choose “Use Google Tag Manager.” Then enter the name of the conversion type you want to measure.
• Select a trigger to signal when the conversion tag gets activated.

The second most popular way to promote your business online is arguably running Facebook Ads. Social media’s popularity increases every year, and Facebook has almost 2 billion active users who engage with the platform daily. So there’s a good chance that people from your target audience also have accounts on this site.

Facebook Ads Conversion Tracking

Once you’ve decided to run a campaign on Facebook, the platform provides an additional feature to track the conversions. It’s called the Facebook pixel, and here’s how to integrate it with GTM:

• Go to Facebook and open the Events Manager. Find “Create Pixel” and click on it.
• Click on “Set up” to see the pixel’s features.
• Choose “Install code manually.” It gives you the code of the pixel. Copy it.
• Go to your GTM account and create a “Custom HTML” tag. Give it a name: “Facebook pixel.”
• Remember the code you copied earlier. Paste it in your HTML container.
• Open “Advanced settings.” Click on the “Tag triggering options.” Choose the option “Once per page.”
• And if not already set up by default, activate the “All Pages” trigger so that triggering the Facebook pixel would happen on every page.

If you’re installing the Google tags for the first time, it’s normal to get a few steps wrong or misspell a trigger. Luckily, there’s an easy way to test out what you’ve created. All you need to do is to download the free Tag Assistant plugin. It provides you with a rundown of all the functioning tags and lets you examine if they get triggered.

Creating a new Google tag together with the triggers that fire takes a little practice. But keeping this article as a quick reminder on how to do it will let you master the craft quickly. And it will be worth it. Tracking conversion events on your site is the best way to know if your marketing efforts are working or not. You’ll also get insights into which channels attract the most customers. It’s all valuable information that serves you well in coming up with strategies to increase your sales. And isn’t that what every business wants?

Which user actions fire tags on your website? Share your experiences with Google Tag Manager in the comments section below.